(1) Field of Invention
The invention relates to methods of allocating page requests to servers on a web farm and, more particularly, to using a neural network to allocate page requests to web farm servers.
(2) Description of Related Art
The World-Wide-Web offers tremendous opportunities for marketers to reach a vast variety of audiences at less cost than any other medium. Recent studies have shown that the web consumes more Internet bandwidth than any other application. With huge amount of capital invested in these sites, it has become necessary to understand the effectiveness and realize the potential opportunities offered by these services.
The number of Web sites on the Internet has grown from an estimated 11,000 sites in 1994 to over 4 million in 2000. The traffic load on the web site is normally measured in terms of the number of http requests handled by the web site. Web sites with heavy traffic loads must use multiple servers running on different hardware; consequently this structure facilitates the sharing of information among servers through a shared file system or via a shared data space. Examples of such a system include Andrews file system (AFS) and distributed file system (DFS). If this facility is not there, then each server may have its own independent file system.
There are four basic approaches to route requests among the distributed Web-server nodes: (1) client-based, (2) DNS-based, (3) dispatcher-based, and (4) server-based. In the client-based approach, requests can be routed to any Web server architecture even if the nodes are loosely connected or are not coordinated. The routing decisions can be embedded by the Web clients like browsers or by the client-side proxy servers. For example, Netscape spreads the load among various servers by selecting a random number i between 1 and the number of servers and directs the requests to the server www.netscape.com. This approach is not widely applicable as it is not easily scalable and many Web sites do not have browsers to distribute loads among servers. However, client-side proxy servers require modifications on Internet components that are beyond the control of many institutions that manage Web server systems.
In the DNS based systems, by translating from a symbolic name to an IP address, the DNS can implement a large set of scheduling policies. The DNS approach is limited by the constraint of 32 Web servers for each public URL because of UDP packet size constraints although it can be scaled easily from LAN to WAN distributed systems.
In the dispatcher-based approach, one single entity controls the routing decisions and implemented through a wide variety of algorithms. Dispatcher failure can disable the system. However, as a centralized controller, the dispatcher can achieve fine-grained load balancing.
The server-based approach can be viewed as a combination of the DNS approach and the dispatcher approach. In the server-based approach, two levels of dispatching are used: (1) cluster DNS first assigns a client request to a Web server; and (2) each Web server may reassign the request to any other server of the cluster. It can achieve the fine-grained control on request assignments as the dispatcher approach and reduces the impact of a central dispatcher failure, but redirection mechanisms typically increase the latency time perceived by the users.
Only the Internet2 Distributed Storage Infrastructure Project (I2-DSI) proposes a “smart” DNS that uses network proximity information such as transmission delays in making routing decisions, as proposed by M. Beck, T. Moore, “The Internet2 Distributed Storage Infrastructure Project: An architecture for Internet content channels,” Proc. Of 3rd Workshop on WWW Caching, Manchester, England, June 1998.
Traditionally, scheduling algorithms for distributed systems are not generally applicable to control Web server clusters because of the non-uniformity of load from different client domains, high variability of real Web workload, and a high degree of self-similarity in the Web requests. The Web server load information becomes obsolete quickly and is poorly correlated with future load conditions. Further, because the dynamics of the WWW involves high variability of domain and client workloads, exchange of information about the load condition of servers is not sufficient to provide scheduling decisions. What is needed is a real time adaptive mechanism that adapts rapidly to changing environment. However, none of the approaches incorporates any kind of intelligence or learning in routing of Web requests.
Further, in any routing scheme, request turn around time (time to service the request) can be greatly decreased if the server chosen to respond to a request has the requested file in that server's cache memory. For instance, requests encrypted using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) use a session key to encrypt information passed between a client and a server. Since session keys are expensive to generate, each SSL request has a lifetime of about 100 seconds and requests between a specific client and server within the lifetime of the key use the same session key. So it is highly desirable to route the requests multiple requests from the same client to a server be routed to the same server, as a different server may not know about the session key, and routing to the same server increases the probability that the prior request is still in the systems cache memory, further decreasing the time required to service the user request. One proposal that combines caching and server replication for client-side proxy servers is given by M. Baentsch, L. Baum, G. Molter, “Enhancing the Web's infrastructure: From caching to Replication,” IEEE Internet Computing, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 18-27, March-April 1997. However, a general scheme to increase the probability that the server chosen to service a particular request has the request page in cache is not presently available.